Rates, interview, and pathology study of cancer of the urinary bladder

SUMMARY-An incidence, interview, and pathology study of cancer of the urinary bladder in whites and Negroes was carried out in New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1958-64. A total of 702 patients were identified with a presumptive or confirmed diagnosis of tumor of the bladder. The physicians in practice in New Orleans initially diagnosed the cancers of the patients in this study. Insofar as possible, pathologists at the National Cancer Institute reviewed the diagnoses. The reviewers aimed to make as certain as possible the diagnosis of the neoplastic lesion, the site of its origin, and its histologic type. In the pathology study the following patients initially reported as having bladder cancer were not included: 2.3 % with clinical diagnoses only, 1.1 % with the histologic diagnosis made by the New Orleans pathologists but not reviewed by National Cancer Institute pathol-ogists, and 6.7 % with a diagnosis of primary cancer in the bladder that was not confirmed after review. The histologic types of 22 (3.5 %) of the 631 cancers in the pathology study were changed after review; 92 % wer